"Illuminating the shadows of the Internet"

illuminating

Opportunistic network and web measurement

•• Project home page
•• Brief overview and news
•• Frequently-asked questions
•• Publications and people
•• Preliminary results
•• Data coverage and proxy maps
•• Join our community

Our Goal

We seek to better understand the peculiarities of Internet and Web network environments and deployments. This information includes the extent, type, and location of clients with respect to their NATs, DNS resolvers, and web proxies.

To do so, we are taking an opportunistic client-side measurement approach, where we seek to leverage traffic from both individual websites and distributed proxy networks such as CoralCDN as a platform to perform measurements.

The map on the top right shows the number of unique hosts for each country from which we have performed measurements, while the bottom suggests how proxies increasing occlude a server's understanding of its client population. More statistics can be found here.

Please find information at this site how you can contribute to this project by helping us with our measurement: it's as simple as adding two lines of HTML to your webpage!

Measuring 6957282 unique hosts from 214 countries
Showing top 50 countries; click here for complete map

Think that client is located in California? Not so fast!
Location of hosts using a Google proxy; click here for more maps

Our last measurement leader was team your.org, contributing 2547907 unique IPs. Pick it up, team Oracle of Bacon!

Note: Illuminati is no longer collecting new data. We include the above graphs and data, however, for historical reasons. Please see our publications page for some of the results of our measurement studies.